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| "genuinely suspenseful" |
Watched: 04/25/2025
Format: Tubi
Viewing: First
Writer/ Director: Allen Wolf
Oh my. Spoilers.
This is an entire movie about a guy who should have done very obvious things when confronted with monumental problems. But then we would not have a movie.
I get it. This is a movie that started as someone's desire to create a "Hitchockian" mystery thriller, found a premise, and worked backward from there. The premise no doubt started as "how do you tell a story about a guy who needs to solve a murder, but he may have committed said murder himself?" Ah ha! I saw cartoons. Sleepwalking. Sleep driving. Sleep sexing! This guy does it all!
The first obvious thing - He kinda/ sorta begins to seek treatment for this condition with medication at the beginning of the film - but only after he somehow sleep-sexes his best friend's wife. Btw, she's far from the first woman he's apparently had luck with whilst sleepwalking, we're told.* Also: He's been driving. He's been wandering around in his undies. He is a mess. He keeps waking up in odd places. With 0% bodyfat.
After a birthday party, attended entirely by his married pal and women he has slept with (I mean... honestly... why?) Our Hero learns the best friend's wife was murdered and found by his father's grave. Kinda sus.
Our Hero gets a mysterious call or two - angry about his blackout sexcapades, and before we've even seen her, the voice is unmistakably the familiar voice of Lacey Chabert. Chabert plays Our Hero's neighbor. She is clearly into him, and, yet, we're not supposed to know that she is the person calling. She is our red herring through the whole movie, and the movie does a pretty good job of setting her up as the murderer, but it's so obvious, you kinda realize it's clearly not her. One, she seems genuinely religious in a WASPy way. Two, Chabert is not physically capable of lifting a normal sized human, or moving a human body. Bot mostly, three, she is all but tap-dancing in front of the audience saying "it's me! I did the murder" that there's no way our 21st century twisty thriller writers are going to make it her.
Anyway - the second the BFF's wife, Ann, turns up dead, Our Hero clearly (and this is the second obvious thing) needed to run to the cops. Which he does not do. He panics and hides evidence he's been clearly up to shenanigans.
Fearing this awful character is gonna lose us, the audience, the writer/ director wants him to be noble - but with that comes actually doing the right thing. He's supposedly an okay guy, so why he doesn't talk to the cops is baffling. But he does go around asking third parties for help, involving them. But won't just go to the people who could actually help clear him and/ or see he has a condition.
This means he includes two women he barely knows (Chabert and Abigail Spencer), essentially making them potential accessories to murder. And both just go along with it.
In a best case scenario where it is Our Hero who done it, what's his plan? Let no one ever know what happened? Let her death be a horrible mystery? Hang out with his best friend (who he works for) forever and just look him in the eye knowing he slept with/ murdered his wife?
The sex addict angle, by the way, goes nowhere. But from a plot perspective, if he goes to Sex Addicts Anonymous, he can meet our next woman - the lady from Timeless. It just kinda fizzles out into a location for things to happen at the SAA meetings. Ie: He is still an addict when he wraps up, with the promise of inflicting himself on Chabert in the near future.
This movie manages to skim right along above the "this is egregiously bad" level and manages to be somewhat technically competent. It stars name actresses (Chabert, Abigail Spencer, Amy Aquino, and Beth Grant, etc..) and a few name actors - somehow Tony Hale is in this. A guy from a lot of stuff from the 00's. Our Hero is not anyone I know.
But it always looks like minimal thought was put into the DP work and set direction. Including some bad FX for things like blood.
There's a whole subplot about Our Hero coming to terms with maybe accidentally killing his father as a kid. I know it's supposed to be important and deep and stuff, but.... holy cripes.
The killer is, of course, the Best Friend who has been somehow framing this dude in ways that make no sense. He seems a bit sore about the fact his pal knocked up his wife.
Is it stupid?
yeah.
I mean, points for not being as bad as some other films, but someone needed to edit the hell out of this script before it went in front of the lens. There's too much and not enough at the same time.
I just think there was a more interesting movie here where we didn't waste time on the "my daddy issues!" subplot. And even a movie where Our Hero did go to the law about his sleep walking and they had to sort it out or figure out if he was responsible if he was honk-shooing his way through murder.
But the logistics of the murder also make no sense. Was Our Hero supposed to have driven over and Zzzzz'd his way into kidnapping Ann, murdering her and placing her body in a third location? Unseen? In his underwear? Then driven home? This is the kind of stuff another pair of eyes on the movie could have helped point out as logical problems.
By the way, Chabert is actually pretty good in this - but I did feel robbed realizing she was a red herring and we would not get to see her get all Boiled Rabbit on Our Hero.
*imagine just wandering into rooms uninvited, and women are so pleased, they are down to clown. This is what I have to imagine is happening - we never see it.
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